Selected Poems 1988-2013

Often considered to be "The greatest poet of our age" (The Guardian), Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He saw poetry as a vocation and credited it with "the power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values." Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney was "the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority." Shortly before his death in 2013, Heaney began to compile Selected Poems 1988-2013, adn although he was unable to complete the project, his choices have been followed here. This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991), with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996), where we experience "the poem as a ploughshare that turns time / Up and over"; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past. -- from back cover.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.